An airline chicken breast, also known as a Statler chicken breast or a chicken suprême, is a chicken breast with the first joint of the wing still attached. If I'm serving a whole chicken breast, I prefer airline breasts over regular boneless breasts, both for the presentation factor (that bone sticking out just looks so cool), and for the juicier meat it produces. Bones don't actually add flavor to meat, but they can moderate heat flow within the cooking breast, ensuring that the fattest part of the breast cooks more gently and evenly.

An airline chicken breast should work in any basic pan-seared chicken breast recipe. You just need to add a little bit of extra time to account for the extra mass when cooking it.

While most butchers should be able to prepare airline breasts for you, it's much more satisfying (not to mention cost-effective) to do it yourself. Start with a whole chicken and you'll end up with a couple of extra wings, a whole carcass, and two legs to use for future meals and stocks.

Here's how you do it.

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